Queer in the Clinic

Beginning with a rumination on the AIDS-inspired poetry of Thom Gunn, this article by the guest editors introduces the special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities titled “Queer in the Clinic.” After providing an overview of the historical legacy and contemporary dilemmas of LGBTQ persons in biomedical practice, the authors describe the rationale of the issue and the contributions included.     

Foreword--As Per Verse: The Queer in the Clinic in the Poem

This essay introduces a series of poems by six authors: Rafael Campo, Susan Holbrook, Katie Price, Trish Salah, Qwo-Li Driskill, and Brian Teare. I argue that the poems demonstrate that a queer bioethics, whether literary or medical, must dispense with commonplace assumptions about the ways in which selves, especially queer selves, are represented in language. Instead, poetry’s sound-sense and avoidance of language-as-usual can serve as an analogy for modes of approach, analysis, and even recognition that do not receive official sanction; the non-linear modes of reading required by contemporary poetry can serve as methodological models for a queer bioethics.     

Deleuze and the Queer Ethics of an Empirical Education

Axiomatic and problematic approaches to ontology are discussed, at first in relation to the work of Badiou and Deleuze in mathematics. This discussion is then broadened focussing on problematics in Deleuze and Guattari’s critiques of capitalism and psychoanalysis which results in an analysis of the implications of this discussion for education. From this, education as being already there, which is an assumption in some strands of philosophy of education, following Deleuze’s critique of axiomatic presentations of ontological identities, is described as a repressive, stabilizing operation, which produces objectives which are characterized as peculiar things. By contrast, those aspects of practice, knowledge, behaviours and populations which cannot be accommodated and resolved by axiomatic formulae and fall from axiomatic systems are characterized as queer things that constitute counter cultures.     

In the Name of Safety: Discursive Positionings of Queer Youth

This paper explores the connections between two common circulating discourses about queer youth and the ways that these discourses are wielded in the name of creating safe spaces for queer youth. First, the discourse of innocence is still applied to queer youth, however, the application has shifted to focus largely on the ways that queer youth are innocent victims in a society structured around heteronormativity. Second, a common response to this innocent victim discourse has been to position queer youth within a discourse of activist educators. “Discourses not only represent the world as it is (or rather is seen to be), they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world, and tied into projects to change the world in particular directions” (Fairclough 2003, p. 24). Gay Straight Alliances are one example; GSAs have sprung up across the country because adults, queer adults and allies in particular, have employed both of these discourses in policy decisions and discussions regarding queer students. This paper will highlight some of the ways the discourses of innocent victims and activist educators have been used in the GSA movement. The paper will apply a queer theory lens to the relationship between these discourses and the GSAs to tease out the ways that they work to simultaneously support queer students and serve to limit how queer students and their schools are imagined. The paper will conclude with a discussion of some possibilities for reworking, rupturing, or transforming these discourses so that schools, as well as the queer students and teachers within them, might be better served.     

We're Here,We're Queer,We're on TV: The Effects of Visual Media on Heterosexuals' Attitudes Toward Gay Men and Lesbians1

Effects of visual media on attitudes toward gay men and lesbians were investigated by exposing 3 groups of participants to a brief video. The first group viewed an anti‐gay video. the second group viewed a pro‐gay video, and a comparison group viewed a neutral video. Participants attitudes were measured immediately following the video after seeing the video, participants were contacted by telephone. and their attitudes were again assessed. Participants were not aware of the connection between the follow‐up assessment and the initial video exposure. At follow‐up. participants attitudes were significantly different. with attitudes with the pro‐gay video group being most positive, and those in the anti‐gay video group being most negative.     

Queer Persona and the Gay Gaze in Brokeback Mountain: Story and Film

Using Jungian and queer theory, this article examines the queer personas of Ennis and Jack, whose queer archetypes fit into a context that had not generally been thought to contain those archetypes. For perhaps the first time a major motion picture appealed to and depicted what Steven Drukman calls the “gay gaze.” Ennis and Jack conform to socially constructed gender roles (as “masculine,” married men), but they are essentially gay. The queer archetype they fit is that of likes: the double of Plato's Symposium, yet both are bereft of gay icons and supportive archetypal stories. Before Brokeback Mountain, never had a mainstream motion picture with such wide appeal directed gay men's attention to the frank love, and lovemaking, of two such nonstereotypically gay and attractive young men. When they first look each other over outside Joe Aguirre's office, Ennis and Jack are unknowingly objects of each other's gay gaze. As gazers, gay men can appreciate these two young men for who they are, not for whom we'd like them to be, as is the case in other mainstream movies. For once we and our sympathetic heterosexual sisters are bearers of the look. To gaze at images that reflect our “inner selves” is a powerful and profound experience, all the more so for its rarity among gay male viewers.     

Queer sentences,ambiguity, and levels of processing

Subjects judged linguistic strings "meaningful" or "meaningless." Meaningful sentences were identical for all subjects; however, for each of five groups, meaningless foils containing different kinds of linguistic violation were interspersed among the meaningful sentences. Type of foil influenced processing time for meaningful items, suggesting that laboratory language processing may be determined by the entire set of linguistic materials used. Effect of foil type on comprehension depth for meaningful items was assessed from the extent to which three kinds of ambiguity slowed judgments on those items as compared to unambiguous sentences. Foil type appears to affect depth of meaningful sentence processing in such a way as to support a "levels of analysis" view of sentence comprehension. Foil type and kind of ambiguity interacted to suggest that sentence comprehension requires computation of underlying logical relationships prior to computation of surface structural relationships and the unequivocal determination of word meanings.     

Queering the Fertility Clinic

A sociologist examines contemporary engagements of queer bodies and identities with fertility biomedicine. Drawing on social science, media culture, and the author’s own empirical research, three questions frame the analysis: 1. In what ways have queers on the gendered margins moved into the center and become implicated or central users of biomedicine’s fertility offerings? 2. In what ways is Fertility Inc. transformed by its own incorporation of various gendered and queered bodies and identities? And 3. What are the biosocial and bioethical implications of expanded queer engagements and possibilities with Fertility Inc.? The author argues that “patient” activism through web 2.0 coupled with a largely unregulated free-market of assisted reproduction has included various queer identities as “parents-in-waiting.” Such inclusions raise a set of ethical tensions regarding how to be accountable to the many people implicated in this supply and demand industry.